


lay everything down and carry on

by starsshinedarkly77



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Crying, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Lup is a good girlfriend, M/M, Magnus is a good boyfriend, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Esteem Issues, Spoilers, they're all dating but it's not really implicit in the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-27 02:37:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12071898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsshinedarkly77/pseuds/starsshinedarkly77
Summary: The Hunger may be gone and the world may be saved, but the effects of a stolen century and a decade of loneliness are a bit harder to shake than the apocalypse.





	lay everything down and carry on

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here's my first Adventure Zone fic, and my first real fic in over a year! It's not much but it feels good to be putting something up again. Barry Bluejeans means more to me than my own life and apparently that means I have to make him suffer, but I did give him cuddles to make up for it. I really hope you enjoy!

_ “Taako, kill me! Just kill me!” _

_ The three bolts of white hot light strike his chest like tiny, burning suns and he’s stumbling backwards, and he’s dying, and there’s a face in front of him that is all static and blur and sorrow and he doesn’t know  _ **_why,_ ** _ and he feels himself smiling and then he is falling, falling, falling -  _

_ And he is dead before he hits the ground, and his body makes contact with the earth and  _ **_shatters,_ ** _ and he doesn’t feel it but he  _ **_hears_ ** _ it, and the sickening snaps of his bones breaking make him feel sick, but not as sick as the feeling of horrified betrayal makes him -  _ **_Lucretia_ ** _ did this, Lucy, Lucretia, why, why,  _ **_why_ ** _ \- not as sick as the knowledge that Lup is  _ **_gone,_ ** _ that his family is  _ **_gone,_ ** _ they’ve forgotten, forgotten  _ **_everything,_ ** _ forgotten each other and forgotten  _ **_him_ ** _ and he is alone, alone,  _ **_alone_ ** _ like he hasn’t been in a century and his soul is  _ **_howling,_ ** _ his lich form shuddering as he tries not to lose himself even as he realizes that he is already lost and he - and he -  _

 

He wakes up. 

No, that’s not quite right; he wakes up  _ gasping _ , desperately trying to draw air into the lungs that he  _ has  _ \- he  _ has  _ lungs that are heaving and burning inside his chest, and a heart that’s pounding, violent and panicked, and a solid, physical body that should be grounding, familiar, comforting, but instead fills him with the fear and dread of forgetting, but instead feels alien and unfamiliar and like it’s barely part of him at all. 

Barry throws his arm out on instinct - it feels like he’s trying to move through water - reaching for the other side of the bed, searching for the body that  _ should  _ be lying next to him, warm and vital and  _ present,  _ but his palm meets empty air before it falls against the mattress, grabbing a fistful of cold and wrinkled sheets. No one there,  _ no one,  _ and no one has been there in quite awhile, and he is  _ alone,  _ Lup is  _ gone,  _ they’re all  _ gone,  _ not again, not again, not  _ again _ . 

He wrenches himself into a sitting position, jamming his fist, still clutching the sheets, into the center of his chest until it aches. He can’t get enough air, he can’t breathe, and he doesn’t know why until he feels the hot tears spilling over his cheeks and realizes he’s sobbing like a child, his face pressed into his knees. He feels ridiculous and ashamed but he can’t stop - he feels agonized and completely numb all at once - he fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand, desperately wanting the grounding that comes with wearing them, desperately needing  _ any  _ grounding at all, but his trembling fingers meet them and send them tumbling to the ground with a sharp clatter. It’s such a small thing but it only makes him cry harder, sending him spiraling further down into his own fear and despair; he feels blind and deaf and isolated and  _ alone,  _ always  _ alone;  _ doesn’t matter that he found his family again, found  _ all  _ of them, they  _ won,  _ they  _ survived,  _ and all for nothing because they’re all gone again, all gone, all gone.

The door bangs inwards, striking loudly against the wall as he winds the fingers of his right hand into his hair and  _ pulls,  _ hard, too hard, sending searing pain shooting through his scalp as he tries to fold himself down ever smaller, and then -

And then - 

And then there are gentle hands cupping the sides of his face, prying his fingers away from his hair, smoothing over the top of his head. There are lips at his hairline, and then at the bridge of his nose, and there are thumbs wiping tears off his cheekbones and out of the bags beneath his eyes even as they continue to fall, fat and hot, from his eyes. 

Lup wraps her arms around his shoulders and pulls him, soft but insistent, partially into her lap, guides his head down to rest against the left side of her chest, where he can hear that her heart, too, is beating, vitally and truly alive. He can feel her breathing, too, just like he is breathing, except while he is still panting for air through clenched and aching lungs, her breath is even and smooth, and on instinct he tries to match her breathing. He doesn’t quite succeed but he can breathe freer, deeper, now that she’s here and holding him and  _ alive. _

A floorboard creaks, and the mattress shifts, and suddenly he’s in someone else’s arms as well; someone bigger and warmer and firmer than Lup but no less gentle. Magnus presses the whole of his torso against Barry’s back, leans over him and Lup both, and Barry knows in any other circumstance she would complain that Magnus was going to crush them, but the solid weight of Magnus’s broad chest pressing down on him, pushing him further into Lup’s embrace, is comforting in a way he can’t even begin to put into words. The panic floods from him like a burst dam, all the tension rushing out of his body along with the fear, but even as he calms he keeps crying. Can’t stop. Doesn’t know if he remembers how to stop. 

He doesn’t deserve them like this, right here, holding him, reminding him that they didn’t lose everything, reminding him that  _ he’s not alone,  _ not anymore, reminding him that he didn’t fail. Because he  _ did  _ fail, both of them, and Taako and Merle and Lucretia and Davenport, all of them, for a whole decade while he tried and failed to find them, to find Lup, to do  _ something.  _ He failed as he bounced back and forth between formless energy and a person he didn’t even know; he failed as he left himself clues and couldn’t follow them, as he found leads too late, always just a little bit too late. 

And that bell, that stupid  _ fucking  _ bell, the one he’d been so proud of when he’d fashioned it from the light of creation, only thinking of the challenge of it, the intricacies of its design, not considering what it was  _ capable  _ of, of what it might be used to do - how many people had suffered, had  _ died,  _ because of that bell? The man currently ticking the shell of his ear with fluffy, auburn sideburns, streaked with the very beginnings of grey, had suffered because of that bell, and Taako and Merle too, forced to play games and make sacrifices while he looked on helplessly, knowing, just below the surface, that he was responsible for it all. 

But in the end, they’d done it, hadn’t they? They’d won. He’d helped. It took too long, far too long, but he’d  _ done  _ it, brought his whole family back together, rounded them all back up  _ alive,  _ if not necessarily well, and they’d  _ won.  _ A century of fighting and running and fighting again come to fruition, and they’d won. Stopped the Hunger. Saved this world. Saved so many lives, in this plane and so many countless others. And they were together again. Alive. Not alone. 

“It’s not fair,” he chokes out into Lup’s blouse, because it’s not, it’s  _ not,  _ no matter how many awful things he’s done or is responsible for. “We  _ won,  _ it’s  _ over,  _ it should be  _ over.  _ Why isn’t it  _ over?” _

Maybe they answer him, maybe they don’t, but all sound is a faint and meaningless buzzing inside his ears and he lies limply between them, for seconds and minutes and days on end, trying to soak up the feeling of not being alone. It’s enough. It is. 

It will have to be. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at starsshinedarkly77.tumblr.com!


End file.
